


Dying is Easy (It's Living That Scares Me to Death)

by onstraysod



Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst, M/M, One Shot, Some People Live/Not Everybody Dies, estranged lovers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-29
Updated: 2020-02-29
Packaged: 2021-02-28 06:08:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,325
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22959214
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/onstraysod/pseuds/onstraysod
Summary: Every morning and every evening, Edward Little sits on a park bench, smoking and staring at the windows of a flat. Hoping, and losing hope.Written for The Terror Bingo square "estranged lovers"
Relationships: Thomas Jopson/Lt Edward Little
Comments: 19
Kudos: 63
Collections: The Terror Bingo (2019)





	Dying is Easy (It's Living That Scares Me to Death)

**Author's Note:**

> Title taken from "Cold" by Annie Lennox

He sits on the same bench every morning and every evening, no matter the weather, the collar of his pea coat turned up against drizzle or snow. There’s a pack of Lambert and Butler in both coat pockets, and he goes through them, right pack in the morning, left at the end of the day. He feels ash on his tongue, but that has nothing to do with the cigarettes, of course. They haven’t created the hollow space in his chest either.

He’s lost track of time. In the smaller sense, it’s that he doesn’t know how many hours he’s sat there, staring at the complex of flats across the road, and won’t know until something reminds him: the tolling of a cathedral bell somewhere, the cafe on the corner opening for lunch, his mobile vibrating in the pocket of his jeans. He never answers it anymore - odds are it’s one of his sisters or the Captain, and they’ll leave voicemails he can later delete - but he checks it every time, hope being eternal, his pulse quickening until he reads the name on the screen. More than once he’s been tempted to fling the phone into the roadway in his disappointment, but he’s not past all sense. Yet. At least a call he doesn’t want to take reminds him of the time.

When he makes up his mind to leave, he does so reluctantly, giving the windows of the flat one last look, grinding the last cigarette of the morning pack out beneath his boot.

Grinding out another chance.

In the larger sense, it’s that he can’t remember if it’s been nine months or ten since they returned. It’s all blended together into one dull, unending day. They are all honorably discharged now, living off disability payments and pensions; where some have embraced this as a reward they’re due, for him it’s been a void. He doesn’t look for work, doesn’t catch up on hobbies. Isn’t going back to uni courtesy of the Navy like Hartnell and Peglar. He crashes at one sister’s place for a few weeks before she - or her husband, if she’s married - loses patience and puts his packed bags beside the door. Then he goes to another sister’s, both praising and cursing his parents for having had so many. At first they nag him: _he’s losing weight, his eyes are bloodshot, is he drinking, is he ill?_ Once he’s stayed awhile, the questions change: _What are you going to do with yourself? You can’t be planning to live on the dole for the rest of your life? Are you looking for a job? Will the Navy have you back?_

He mumbles a vague answer, if he bothers to answer at all.

When he checks his voicemail - still hoping, fool that he is - he finds a dozen messages from the Captain. They’re a progression of emotion that matches the man. The friendly “how are you faring?” of the first morphs gradually into the “answer your goddamn phone Edward!“ of the last. Edward deletes them all without replying. There’s no point. Nothing the Captain says matters anymore. Nothing matters anymore at all.

So he sits on the bench, going through days and cigarettes, watching, hoping. And once and awhile, the door of the complex opens and the face that emerges is as familiar to him as the lines on his own palms.

That morning, the face is angry. Edward can see it in the eyes, aquamarine flashing like a wrathful sea, all the way across the street. His stride as he crosses through a break in traffic is fast and vigorous for a man who’d come so close to death less than a year before, and Edward is relieved to see it. It takes good health to sustain such a rage.

“You’ve got to stop this!” Ever the discrete steward, Thomas hisses the words beneath his breath, pausing to glance around them. “Sitting out here, staring at my windows, isn’t going to change anything. It’s over, Edward. We’re done. Get that through your head, because I’m tired of saying it.”

“I just want to talk, Thomas.”

“I’m done talking. Talking can’t fix this.” Tom stands with his fists balled in the pockets of his hoodie, his shoulders hunched against the chill. His words are clipped, his teeth snapping together as he speaks. “You made your choice back there, when you left me. Now I’ve made mine.”

Edward remains on the bench as Tom turns his back and retreats across the road. He lifts his hand, bringing the cigarette between his fingers back to his mouth, and he takes a long drag. The smoke tastes stale and burns all the way down to the pit of his lungs. Finally, he stands, drops the cigarette butt, grinds it out on the concrete. The cafe is open, so it’s past eleven. He’ll come back again at sunset.

***

The hours between vigils are spent thinking wistfully of an icebound research ship and a complex of makeshift shelters made of shipping containers and sheets of plastic tarp. When all the expedition’s electronics simultaneously failed, leaving them without direction or lines of contact to the world beyond, the crew divided their time between the trapped ship and the nearest island, a spit of gravel scarcely higher than the frozen sea. They had lived off energy bars and ramen noodles cooked on emergency camp stoves, cans of soup and vegetables and boxes of crackers, rationing when the supplies began to dwindle, the few men who were any good with a gun hunting birds and caribou and Arctic hares when any of those deigned to appear. Skin was exposed, digits frostbitten and lost, men sickened, tempers flared. Months upon months of increasing despair were accompanied by the deepening discomfort of wet, weathered clothes and threadbare socks, muscle aches, creeping illness, and unrelenting cold, and yet they were the happiest years of Edward Little’s life.

Wherever he was - sitting on the bench, leaning on the rail of Parliament Bridge, staring up at the ceiling in a sister’s spare room - he thought of Tom and the inky blackness of his hair in the half-light of the shelter, the blue tint of the tarp that covered the eastern window washing its color over his pale skin. How, on a balmy afternoon, he’d found the captain’s steward lying in his lumpy excuse for a bedroll, flinging back the insulated blanket to reveal his nudity, and the warmth they’d created with just the movement of their bodies, the open, questing journey of their mouths. He remembered the music of Tom’s laughter after he’d told some stupid joke at the expense of one of their shipmates, the sacred obscenity of the sound in that godforsaken place, and how it had wrapped its silvery tone around his heart then and echoed still in his ears.

 _We’ll be home soon._ Edward had whispered words he couldn’t believe into Tom’s skin, hoping somehow the haze of pleasure in which they were uttered could make them true. _Rescue will come. Tomorrow, the day after…_

 _I don’t think about tomorrow anymore._ Tom had locked his legs around Edward’s waist as he said this, holding him fast, hands spread to sweep along the muscles of the lieutenant’s back. _There’s only this moment. And the next. And what I’ll do to you before this hour is over and we have to leave this bed._ His mouth was sinfully warm, his body a refuge, and Edward took shelter inside him, forgetting there was any other life to return to, not caring when he did remember.

***

There were memories Edward didn’t want to recall, but they came anyway, hardy things resistant to the endless stream of pints he poured to wash them away. Those last desperate days and miles, pushing himself beyond the limits of endurance, panic keeping his pulse at a ready gallop whether walking or resting. The medic on the runway in Nuuk, who had pressed the end of his stethoscope to Tom’s chest and looked up at Edward with wide, mute eyes, unable to offer any word of comfort. When the sickest of the men were flown to Reykjavik, Edward had gone with Tom, even though his own health qualified him to travel straight to England. At the hospital in the Icelandic capital, he’d held vigil at Tom’s bedside, listening for a word of sense in the mumbled nonsense of his delirium. The hours passed like dripping molasses, Edward clinging to his sanity by his fingernails.

On the evening Tom returned to consciousness, he gone to the cafeteria for a cup of coffee. A nurse came for him, and he’d sprinted up four flights of stairs, making better time than he could by riding the elevator.

Tom had greeted him with a small smile. _I bet you’re surprised to see me alive._

_I’m thankful._

But Tom had shaken his head against the pillow. _You left me, Edward. Left me to die. Did you think I wouldn’t remember? You knew how sick I was. Knew I couldn’t make the trip._ He paused to cough and clear his throat, wincing at the pain. _You abandoned me, and Peglar, and all the rest._ All the sweetness that had sustained Edward for so long had gone from Tom’s eyes, leaving their color and sharpness to resemble nothing so much as the sea ice that had held them all captive. _I woke up that morning and it was so silent. It was always silent up there, but this silence was different, total, like a tomb: no movement, no voices, no steps on the gravel. I called out for you, and the silence ate up my voice but I kept calling, until my throat was raw. But you never came, and I knew…_

Tears had washed down Tom’s cheeks and he’d turned his head away, saying no more. Edward had spoken - he couldn’t remember what, maybe Tom’s name, maybe one of the nicknames he’d called him in tender moments. Maybe he’d apologized or wept or cursed. But Tom had refused to look at him again. Staggering from the room, one hand on the cold sterile wall of the corridor, Edward had wandered out of the hospital, into the chill of a night that he couldn’t feel, numb as he was. He’d wandered down to the harbor and stared out at the black chop of the sea, thinking about drowned sailors, how many of them there must be milling about on the sea floor from all the ages of the world, their bones crusted with coral and algae, their broken hearts long since rendered food for plankton.

***

One evening, Thomas had relented enough to invite him in.

It was an exceptionally cold night, snow beginning to fall in thick woolly sheets. Tom had returned to his flat with a bag of groceries, pausing in front of the building doors to look at Edward, the snow already gathered thick on his hair and coat and the slats of the bench around him. “Come on,” Tom had said, jerking his head in an upward direction, and something inside of Edward burst, flooding him with poisonous hope.

They had been only moments in the flat when Edward had tried to apologize and Tom had lashed out in response. What started as a war of words had ended finally in a stalemate: no victor, no vanquished, just two naked bodies and a bed for a battleground. Tom had stoppered his bitter words with Edward’s cock, and Edward had let him, staring up at the ceiling, boneless and thoughtless, his fingers tangled knuckle-deep in Tom’s hair. By the time the sun poked through the curtains, Tom was dressed and throwing Edward’s clothes at his face. “Get out,” he’d snapped and Edward had obeyed, sullenly silent, only pausing on the way to the door when he passed Tom in the hall.

“I never want to see you again,” Tom had spat.

***

The end of his isolation was purely accidental. Out of cigarettes, Edward stopped one afternoon at his usual corner store after leaving Tom’s flat and ran into George Hodgson, his fellow lieutenant’s hands full of Party Rings and Jaffa cakes.

“Everybody’s worried sick about you, mate. You don’t answer your mobile, you won’t see anyone. There have been four functions held in our honor in the past two months and you haven’t showed for any of them.”

“I haven’t felt much like celebrating.”

“All right, I get it, those big soirées can be a bit overwhelming. Forget that. But how about just coming to share a pint with one of your best mates, huh? Do you good.”

Edward had never considered George one of his best friends, but then George believed himself to be the best friend of everyone he met. The bad memories were plaguing him that day, clamoring to be drank away, so in a moment of weakness Edward had caved. Stashing his candy in the pockets of his coat, George had walked Edward to a nearby pub.

The place was mostly empty at that hour, save for a man sitting at a corner table, a cup of coffee between his hands. When Edward saw him, he pulled up short and swore.

“This is what happens when you don’t answer your fucking phone,” the Captain snarled.

Edward rounded on George, who held up both hands. “Look, mate, I’m sorry. But like I said, everyone’s worried about you--"

“Not everyone,” Edward mumbled. “That’s the problem.”

George left him alone with the Captain, and Crozier ordered him a stout. The older man stayed silent until the drink was brought, and then had the decency to skip the small talk. 

“May I ask you something, Edward? Do you think I’m a complete idiot? That I’m either too stupid or too repressed to understand the nature of you and Tom’s relationship?” The Captain scoffed and took a sip of his coffee. “I grant you, I was quite drunk for awhile, but it would have taken something stronger than whiskey not to see what had developed between the two of you.”

Edward focused on the foamy head of his drink, turning the glass around between his hands. He was no longer thirsty for it, wishing instead for a stinging lungful of polar sea air. “As obvious as that, huh?”

Crozier shrugged. “Only because I’m cursed to think of you all as my sons. To know you all as well as if I’d raised you.”

“And in your fatherly role, I suppose you’re here to warn me off. To tell me to stay away from Tom.”

“No. I’m here to tell you to start fighting.” The Captain fixed Edward with a merciless stare. “Believe me, I can tell when someone’s given up. When they’ve settled into despair like it’s a comfortable old chair. You’ve got despair written all over you, Edward, from that Oasis-reject hair to the stink of cigarette smoke in your clothes. I thought my first lieutenant was made of tougher stuff than this.”

“Try spending almost three years in the ice and then having your heart broken,” Edward snapped. The Captain leaned so close to him their noses almost met.

“I have,” he hissed.

Of course. In the cocoon of his own pain, Edward had forgotten. Crozier knew what it was to suffer, the emotional following hard on the heels of the physical. How many times had that blonde travel reporter rejected him: twice? Three times? “Sorry,” he mumbled, swallowing his shame with a wash of stout.

“Never mind. Listen to me, Edward. There’s no over and done until you’re dead and gone. I know some of what happened while I was away from the camp. Don’t ask how,” Crozier added quickly, though Edward knew the precise grapevine the information had traveled along to reach the Captain’s ear. “But I’d like to hear it all now, from you. And just so you know, I’m not going to fuck off and leave you alone until I have. I’ll make it an order if I must, though I have no power now to enforce it. For old time’s sake.”

Before he could invent a reason not to, Edward began to talk. He began with the day when both Crozier and the commander were off dealing with the mutineers at their separate camp, the very day the jury-rigged radio Hartnell had fashioned from odds and ends had finally picked up a signal. How, through Morse Code, Edward and Dundy Le Vesconte - the last two officers in reasonable health - had communicated with a seasonal research station twenty miles to the east across the ice, and learned that the station would be manned for one more week before the scientists had to depart for the winter. He told the Captain how he and Le Vesconte had immediately started preparing the ragged group to travel. But then a snowstorm had blown in, and for three days they’d waited, hoping conditions would improve enough to allow the sickest men - Tom among them - to make the journey. When it didn’t, and fearing the imminent departure of the research station team, Le Vesconte had offered Edward a new plan. The healthy would leave the next morning, abandoning those too ill to make the trip. 

_It’s our last chance, Edward. I don’t relish it, God knows I’d do anything for it to be otherwise, but if we stay here with them, we all die. We won’t last another season._

_They know where we are now, Dundy. You think they’ll just leave us up here? They’ll send help for all of us._

_Are you sure about that? Winter is upon us again, the weather’s gone unpredictable. Even if they do send help, it may not get through, or it may be weeks, or months, before a helicopter can even get permission to fly. How many of us do you think will be left by then, Edward?_

_You’re asking me to leave behind almost half our men! Including the Captain and Commander Fitzjames, not to mention--_ Edward had bitten off the name in the nick of time. _My friends._

_Maybe we’ll be able to come back for them._

_Maybe? That’s a hell of a maybe._

Dundy had shrugged. _And if you allow all of us to perish because you refused to reach help when you had the chance? In your final moments, will you be able to live with that?_

 _I know what I can’t live without,_ Edward had answered. 

But Le Vesconte was clever, and he wielded words for maximum impact. He spoke of duty, of responsibility, of Edward’s position as first lieutenant and leader in the absence of both captains. He talked of Edward’s old dad, another Navy veteran, waiting for his son’s return, and transitioned smoothy from this into the other parents, the siblings, the sweethearts and wives, the children, all hoping against hope. Edward crumbled beneath the pressure, knowing that he did have a responsibility to the men who had the greatest chance of survival, and hating every single one of them for it. In his darkest thoughts, he knew he’d trade every one of them, their wives, and their children, for Thomas to live one more day.

By then Tom was delirious most of the time, though somehow he retained his beauty through fever and weakness and bleeding, sore-pocked gums. He only recognized Edward’s presence in a vague way when he knelt to kiss him goodbye. It took three days of agonizing labor to reach the station, and when they did, Edward - frostbitten, windburned, so exhausted his legs wouldn’t stop shaking - had immediately done two things. First he’d punched Le Vesconte in the face, fracturing his fine Gallic nose. Then he’d turned around and started back to the sick camp. It had taken several of his men, including a bleeding Le Vesconte, to restrain him.

Another blizzard delayed any return, and when the helicopters arrived to transport the scientists, they had urged Edward to give up his plan. But he’d refused. One of the helicopter pilots had taken pity on him, and when the skies were clear enough to fly, they’d reached the camp in hours rather than days. But by that time, help had already arrived. Crozier and Fitzjames had returned with the mutineers’ hostages and a band of Inuit who’d fed the ailing on seal and caribou meat, piling the creatures’ pelts upon their withered bodies. The native people sustained them until breaks in the deteriorating weather allowed the rescue helicopters to get through.

“Did you tell Thomas all of this?” the Captain asked. Edward shook his head.

“I tried, but he didn’t want to listen.”

“Then tell him again! For fuck’s sake, Edward.” Crozier rubbed at the bridge of his nose as if pained. “You’re the most stubborn man I’ve ever known, and that’s coming from one of the worst.”

“You must not be well acquainted with your steward, then.”

“Tom will come around. I’m sure of it.”

“Tom’s moved on. And I won’t stop him. Even if I never can.” Edward swallowed down another mouthful of stout. It tasted more bitter than normal, and not in a pleasant way. “I remember thinking, up there, if I could only survive long enough to save Tom, to make sure he lived, I’d be content. Well, I got my wish. Tom is alive and I’m surviving.”

“Surviving… that isn’t enough,” the Captain said.

“It will have to be, won’t it?”

***

He was back on the bench in front of Tom’s flat by sundown, unwrapping the cellophane from the fresh pack of Lambert and Butler. The spark of his lighter left a purple burn upon his field of vision; around its edges, headlights cut through the night.

Four or five cigarettes later, a figure in a dark coat jogged across the lanes of traffic. Tom stopped a few feet before the bench, fingering his tie. He was dressed in a dark blue suit, and as ever, the sight of him stole Edward’s breath away.

“I just left James Ross’s dinner party. He said you were invited, but you never replied to his e-mail. Why didn’t you come?”

“I had no reason to.”

“Dundy was there. He told me everything, Edward. How he pressured you. The things he said. How you fought him. How you were determined to go back for me, and would have, but for the storm and being restrained. And how you’d be dead now if you had. For my sake.” His jaw tightened and he looked away, at the lights of the City glistening in the distance. “I couldn’t be more angry with myself, Ed, but fuck, I’m still so angry with you. Why didn’t you tell me?”

“The first thing you said when you woke up was that I’d left you for dead. And it made me wonder if maybe you were right. Maybe I did, maybe I chose my own survival over yours. If my Tommy could believe me capable of that, why wouldn’t I believe it myself?”

“Jesus, Edward, I was wrong! And I never really believed that. It’s just, I… I’d been trying to make you a villain. I guess it worked better than I thought.” Seeing the confusion in Edward’s furrowed brow, Tom sighed. “Those three years… they were the happiest of my life. But they were too good, you know? _We_ were too good. To be true.” He made a helpless gesture with one hand. “I was sure it couldn’t last, not when we got back here. I thought you’d break things off, that with your career and your family there would be no place for me in your life. And so I tried to start hating you before it happened, so it wouldn’t hurt so much when it did. I failed so miserably that by the time I got sick I was happy to die. It was better than losing you.”

Edward shook his head slowly. “I was coming back here to make a life with you. I thought you knew me better than to think otherwise.” Silence fell between them for a moment as they held one another’s gaze. “I guess neither of us knew each other as well as we thought we did.”

“I don’t think we knew each other at all.”

Somewhere in the direction of Harrow a siren sounded, distorted by distance into a noise from another, separate world. “Do you remember how George would go on and on speculating about his past lives?” Edward asked. “How it would irritate John?” When Tom nodded, Edward shrugged. “Maybe we knew each other in another life. Maybe things worked out better for us in that one.”

“I hope so.” Tom’s voice was very quiet, very soft.

Edward stood, enacting his ritual, grinding his cigarette out against the pavement. Then he took a single step closer to Tom, his hands thrust firmly into the pockets of his coat. “I wish the best of everything for you, Thomas.”

“And I for you, Edward.” Tom looked down at the smashed butt and ashes, his lower lip caught between his teeth. His voice had broken on the words.

Edward passed by him with inches to spare: gone were the days of intentional-accidental touches, the brush of elbow against arm or hand against hand. Turning south toward the Thames, he began to walk away.

“But maybe we’re getting our next life now.” Tom’s voice arrested Edward’s steps, turning him. “Maybe we got close enough to dying to warrant a second chance. And maybe… Maybe we can get to know each other now?”

His face was bathed in the building’s illumination, his bright eyes wide as he waited for Edward’s answer. But Edward said nothing, his voice cut away by hope, its dual-blades edged with both sorrow and pain.

“Would you like to come upstairs?” Tom asked. “I could make some tea.”

Slowly, like the first sunrise after an Arctic winter, Edward smiled. “Yeah. I’d like that.”

**Author's Note:**

> Special thanks to Abel for help with the cigarettes and candy!


End file.
